Empathy is absolutely essential if you value the human spirit and all of humankind. In fact, without it, it’s impossible to experience that oneness that every religion teaches is the universal reality that contains all life and God and the infinity of space. Empathy is that capacity to experience our connection with each other and all living beings. Empathy is the sentient equivalent of gravity: it’s what binds us together. Any movement concerned with human rights, the health of the planet, and the wellbeing of others as well as oneself is fueled by empathy. Without empathy, you can’t have compassion—empathy constructs your ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes and to see a little bit of yourself in another person. Without empathy, it’s impossible to appreciate what another person is feeling or what their experience might mean to them. It is just this ability to understand what other people are experiencing that prompts compassion—or sympathetic response—to the meaning of what’s happening to them.
Empathy and love go together like hand in glove. Love could be said to be empathy and compassion working together, since when those are in play, you are not only expressing that you care for the other person, but also that you understand that person’s plight. And it’s that sympathetic understanding that makes the difference in any loving expression. When love is expressed, not only your words but your whole nonverbal communication should sync up with what the other person is experiencing. When the value that rules a person, community, or country is love rather than comfort, prosperity, or power, you make very different choices in the way you engage with others. You don’t start by setting your stance for competition or seduction, you start with empathy, curiosity, and genuine interest in the wellbeing of all. Rather than what can I get out of this, what will be my takeaway, what is on this table for me, you will instead be assessing what do I have to bring to this table, how can I bring my uniqueness to help this person, community, or country flourish?
That is the impulse behind the movement that’s bringing all movements together. Love is the core, and love is what we want to start seeing from our political leaders. Love of life, of each person that exists, of everything that supports life on the planet. It’s a tough love, mind you, and it doesn’t square with the those who value power instead. However, it’s true that love feels better than hate and indifference alike. It opens hearts instead of closing them or walling them off. It builds bridges to those around you instead. But it’s not an easy Hallmark card kind of sappy “love.” For the kind of love I’m speaking of has to make sure that what you’re giving is what is needed. Which means you have to get comfortable with discomfort, actually being open to how others’ experience is different from yours. So what does that look like?
Let’s look at it politically. When the legislature leads with the value of love it will be looking for what government can bring to a community, the country, or the world that will make life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness more sustainable for all. Its work will doubtless be to provide the easing of economic pain and suffering to individuals as well as groups or regions or those who have been marginalized by our historical errors. Since only a little bit of research will make clear how America’s and white people’s power and affluence has adversely affected other countries and people of color, redress is the action that follows from empathy and love. This isn’t just about providing assistance or help to someone in need; it’s about looking at the structure of society—historically, economically, and socially—through the eyes of love rather than power or self-interest alone. For example, if everyone has equal rights, what then has kept this person or that group from enjoying those rights to the fullest? The inquiry would require us all to go back and retrofit the structures that placed obstacles in the paths of some while opening pathways for others. We would have to inquire into the decisions and policies that opened those pathways for some while closing them for others. People tend to know their own experience, so this process would involve listening with love and seeing through the eyes of the other speakers. This process is called Truth and Reconciliation. And it is the way some countries learn from their mistakes. South Africa, for example. Germany, for another. We have yet to do this as a nation.
We know this is not an easy process in personal situations; listening to someone who feels wronged by you is hard. It’s painful. We get defensive; we fear losing our footing. It requires stamina, forgiveness, compassion for oneself as well as for the anger we feel coming at us. The emotional “muscle” for this has to be developed. It won’t be if we don’t believe in its necessity. The same is true for groups, communities, the country, which is made up of mere human beings, after all. They might have power, but they protect it as any of us protect ourselves, with fear, defensiveness, denial, cognitive dissonance. It takes great personal and political will to get through it.
Men who have managed to save their marriages to feminist women might have an understanding of the humility required to recognize how society has empowered them (to whatever extent it has, given other factors of class, race, physical ability, etc.) but not the women they love. Women who have managed to maintain and develop relationships with racial, sexual orientation, or physical health differences might have some idea of the honesty, openness, and patience required to recognize and honor the ways society has empowered them (to whatever extent it has) to the detriment of their associate. And vice versa. Those women and men who have been marginalized by societal structures have some idea of the assertiveness, insistence, patience, and forgiveness it takes to hang in there with friends and associates from more privileged groups. And for all these individuals, it’s possible that, primarily, it takes willingness. Consider then how much harder it is to do these things as a country. When love is not personal, where do we find that willingness? Clearly, we have not had the will as a country, but we balance on the edge of it now in this growing movement of empathy, love, and willingness.
In this country, our placing a value of love above all else would mean we must find out what has been done (Truth) and how to make things right (Reconciliation). This paradigm shift is partly based on confronting personal errors—nothing develops empathy and compassion as well as personal inquiry. Building that personal muscle to witness the conditions of others will help us do the more important work of confronting structural errors, the wrongs that are built into the system. Every human being makes mistakes, but it’s the ones we institutionalize, weave into policy, and bury in custom and practice that create a system of power over people rather than one of partnership, where the structure of society is one that supports life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness so that everyone flourishes. If not everyone is flourishing—however people define that for themselves—we need to find out what they need so that they can. That’s the way directed by love. That’s the politics with love as its value rather than power. Whether that power is expressed as authority/influence, wealth/enslavement, or punishment/permission, a structure that values power rather than love will fail most of its people much of the time and some of its people all of the time. This is how our country has failed working people and female people much of the time, and Black people and Native people most, if not all, of the time.
A politician working within a system of love—or someone simply concerned about the human condition—would naturally wish to respond to human need or dissatisfaction with solutions rather than reacting to someone’s need or protest as obstacles to the politician’s own acquisition. In the public service sector, it would mean being other-centered, caring about constituencies and environments, rather than self-centered and only caring for yourself and your friends. On the contrary, the governmental system operating today, controlled as it is by a self-obsessed ruling class, has politicians primarily concerned with their own careers and the extreme wealth of a small group of people. For that reason, in particular, Republican politicians support only the Republican platform, the Republican Party talking points, and the Republican administration’s values, which are all about me first. “Me” really meaning only the richest people in the world. Democrats haven’t done much better—all but the Black Caucus have held tightly to a white suburban worldview—but more and more of them are starting to listen.
It is important to remember that while we want our representatives in a republic to actually represent the will of their districts, our districts, once elected they don’t make their pledge to us, but to the Constitution. That means they are charged with keeping the needs of all Americans in their sights at all times, even while trying to square differing needs district by district, state by state.
The question is do we have a system that can be infused with the value of love or was it built for a power-over mentality? The framers of the Constitution, particularly George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, had an inkling that this conflict between love (the vision) and power (some of the people) would pose a danger to the future of the Republic. What Washington warned in his Farewell Address has come to pass a few times, resulting in the Civil War, the McCarthy Era, and the current era. But we think it’s redeemable. We think it’s redeemable if we can redeem ourselves and understand this love of power as a vice, a temptation, an addiction to our lesser selves. Not something to admire. We think the vision of fairness and integrity within our Constitution would be attainable if only the dominator mindset could be relinquished. In fact, we think it is the only way to fulfill the promise in the Constitution.
What is the dominator mindset? It goes by many names depending on your point of view, but all of them set one group’s desires, wrapping them into some kind of default reality, over everyone else’s. Call it patriarchy (male supremacy over reality[1]), white supremacy (Anglo power over reality), wealth supremacy (the supremacy of the rich over reality), and human supremacy (the supremacy of the human ego over reality). It is the idea that competition is better than cooperation, that selfishness and greed are ideal motivators, and that it is human nature to be at war at all times. We think these are not natural tendencies but are as made up as the divine rights of kings, embryonic sperm, and the sun rotating around the earth. If we stop repeating the untruths and start engaging with people and government according to the Constitution, rather than letting powerful men manipulate it toward their own ends, we could still make a United States of America that was in fact a free country. The choice is ours.
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[1] Reality being all of creation, the universe, the seen and unseen, in all its diversity, spectrum, and fulfillment, something that cannot be fully known or expressed by any one perspective.
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Kathryn L. Robyn and H. John Lyke are the authors of Political Straight Talk: A Prescription for Healing Our Broken System of Government.